Romnography: Syria’s March to the Sea

By now, everybody has heard something about Mitt Romney’s geography lesson last night—the one he was (explicitly) trying to give, and the one that he was (implicitly) given. “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world, “ he announced ominously at one point in the debate. “It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel.” This ‘route to the sea’ business, is true, of course—though only in the sense that the Upper East Side is New Jersey’s “route to the river”: if Chris Christie, in a crazed, Springsteen-fuelled burst of imperial ambition, sent his troopers to occupy Central Park and invade Yorkville he would be able to get to the East River, though this little scenario ignores the truth that he doesn’t need the route to the river in the first place, since he’s got another river right in front of him. (The Hudson, for the non-New Yorkers out there.) Similarly, the Iranians could take Syria as a “route to the sea,” but hardly need to, since they already live on several. There’s the famous Gulf of Oman, the well-known Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf, all of which border Iran—while Syria, as it happens, does not. So if for some reason an Ayatollah wanted to break out toward the Mediterranean, he would first have to invade Turkey and/or Iraq, rather as Governor Christie, to conclude this equivalence, would first have to conquer the West Side in his relentless march to a staging area in Carl Schurz Park, and watery dominance.

Various explanatory theories have been launched to justify this bit of geo-strategic thinking on the Governor’s part. His campaign fires back, essentially, that if the Iranians for some reason did want to get to the Mediterranean, it would be nice to have a friendly government in Syria as they marched there. Having just come out of a long, damp march through geographic history myself, for a piece in this week’s magazine, I felt a little for the Governor. The geography of the Middle East or Near East or whatever we’re calling it now is tricky to hold onto, even as, at certain historic moments, it can be decisive. But one point I make in that essay is that the assertion of ominous geostrategic logic is, and always has been, the impatient man’s alternative to the ambiguities of real conduct, and a shortcut to an appearance of expertise. Saying, “I fear the Syrian-Iranian alliance,” sounds banal, even if it’s true. Invoking a potential Iranian “path to the sea” makes it sound as though deep forces are at play. It’s a cheap way to try and sound knowing about the imponderable. (How many times, throughout the Cold War, did we hear of Russia’s desperate need for a warm-water port?)

The truth is that geostrategic thinking often works more as an intoxicant than as an explanation, as it seemed to have on the good Governor last night. Of course, geography affects history and life in countless ways, some obvious (New York grew because of its fine natural harbor) and some less obvious (New Jersey’s industrial cities grew up to make things that could be shipped out of the New York port), but other forces, some ideological and others fortuitous, count for a lot, too. Iran would only need to make that long circuitous march through Turkey toward the Mediterranean if some ideological need (religious warfare, certainly, might be one) drove it there.

There are, we are told often, certain “thresholds” that candidates for President have to cross. One is pronouncing correctly, or coming close enough to pronouncing correctly, the name of the President of Iran. (When Sarah Palin crossed that one, her people applauded.) Romney’s invocation of the Iranian “route to the sea” wasn’t all that different from Sarah Palin’s Russia argument for her foreign-policy expertise. Her point was not just that she could see Russia from her house but that Putin’s route to the Continent passed through Alaska. That, in the twenty-first century, Alaska would be what is sometimes called “fly-over country” didn’t alter how impressive she found this point.

Another slightly higher threshold, or rhetorical hurdle, is that of seeming to master deep thought, big-picture strategic thinking. Republicans used to go to Henry Kissinger for this, though in those days it was usually to learn that Iran must not be allowed to dominate the Persian Gulf, rather than that it might have itches for seas elsewhere. Governor Romney decided to take a run at that hurdle last night, and he banged his shins. (The thing about Romney, though, is that when he bangs his shins, he doesn’t seem to notice, and runs right at another hurdle.) If there is a message in Romney’s march to the sea it is this: always mistrust politicians who invoke the inexorable geographic logic governing the other guy’s position, especially when it means travelling through a couple of hostile countries just to get all wet.